Cold Fire Read online

  “Well, my brother wasn’t one of your students. He was an English instructor in the same school. I traced him there, and learned you’d taught in the room next to his for ten years, you knew him well.”

  Viola’s face brightened into a smile. “You mean Jim Ironheart!”

  “That’s right. My brother.”

  “This is lovely, wonderful, this is perfect!” Viola enthused.

  The woman’s reaction was so excessive that Holly blinked in surprise and didn’t know quite what to say next.

  “He’s a good man,” Viola said with genuine affection. “I’d have liked nothing better than to’ve had a son like him. He comes around now and then for dinner, not as often as he used to, and I cook for him, mother him. I can’t tell you how much pleasure that gives me.” A wistful expression had settled on her, and she was silent a moment. “Anyway... you couldn’t have asked for a better brother, dear. He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, a dedicated teacher, so gentle and kind and patient.”

  Holly thought of Norman Rink, the psychopath who had killed a clerk and two customers in that Atlanta convenience store last May, and who had been killed in turn by gentle, kind Jim Ironheart. Eight rounds from a shotgun at point-blank range. Four rounds fired into the corpse after Rink was obviously dead. Viola Moreno might know the man well, but she clearly had no concept of the rage that he could tap when he needed it.

  “I’ve known good teachers in my time, but none as concerned about his students as Jim Ironheart was. He sincerely cared about them, as if they were his own kids.” She leaned back in her chair and shook her head, remembering. “He gave so much to them, wanted so much to make their lives better, and all but the worst-case misfits responded to him. He had a rapport with his students that other teachers would sell their souls for, yet he didn’t have to surrender a proper student-teacher relationship to get it. So many of them try to be pals with their students, you see, and that never really works.”

  “Why did he quit teaching?”

  Viola hesitated, smile fading. “Partly, it was the lottery.”

  “What lottery?”

  “You don’t know about that?”

  Holly frowned and shook her head.

  Viola said, “He won six million dollars in January.”

  “Holysmoke!”

  “The first time he ever bought a ticket.”

  Allowing her initial surprise to metamorphose into a look of worry, Holly said, “Oh, God, now he’s going to think I only came around because he’s suddenly rich.”

  “No, no,” Viola hastened to assure her. “Jim would never think the worst of anyone.”

  “I’ve done well myself,” Holly lied. “I don’t need his money, I wouldn’t take it if he tried to give it to me. My adoptive parents are doctors, not wealthy but well-to-do, and I’m an attorney with a nice practice.”

  Okay, okay, you really don’t want his money, Holly thought with self-disgust as caustic as acid, but you’re still a mean little lying bitch with a frightening talent for invented detail, and you’ll spend eternity standing hip-deep in dung, polishing Satan’s boots.

  Her mood changing, Viola pushed her chair back from the table, got up, and stepped to the edge of the patio. She plucked a weed from a large terra-cotta pot full of begonias, baby’s breath, and copper-yellow marigolds. Absentmindedly rolling the slender weed into a ball between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she stared thoughtfully out at the parklike grounds.

  The woman was silent for a long time.

  Holly worried that she had said something wrong, unwittingly revealing her duplicity. Second by second, she became more nervous, and she found herself wanting to blurt out an apology for all the lies she’d told.

  Squirrels capered on the grass. A butterfly swooped under the patio cover, perched on the edge of the lemonade pitcher for a moment, then flew away.

  Finally, with a tremor in her voice that was real this time, Holly said, “Mrs. Moreno? Is something wrong?”

  Viola flicked the balled-up weed out onto the grass. “I’m just having trouble deciding how to put this.”

  “Put what?” Holly asked nervously.

  Turning to her again, approaching the table, Viola said, “You asked me why Jim ... why your brother quit teaching. I said it was because he won the lottery, but that really isn’t true. If he’d still loved teaching as much as he did a few years ago or even one year ago, he would’ve kept working even if he’d won a hundred million.”

  Holly almost breathed a sigh of relief that her cover had not been penetrated. “What soured him on it?”

  “He lost a student.”

  “Lost?”

  “An eighth-grader named Larry Kakonis. A very bright boy with a good heart—but disturbed. From a troubled family. His father beat his mother, had been beating her as long as Larry could remember, and Larry felt as if he should be able to stop it, but he couldn’t. He felt responsible, though he shouldn’t have. That was the kind of kid he was, a real strong sense of responsibility.”

  Viola picked up her glass of lemonade, returned to the edge of the patio, and stared out at the greensward again. She was silent once more.

  Holly waited.

  Eventually the woman said, “The mother was a co-dependent type, a victim of the father but a collaborator in her own victimization. As troubled in her own way as the father. Larry couldn’t reconcile his love for his mother and his respect for her with his growing understanding that, on some level, she liked and needed to be beaten.”

  Suddenly Holly knew where this was going, and she did not want to hear the rest of it. However, she had no choice but to listen.

  “Jim had worked so hard with the boy. I don’t mean just on his English lessons, not just academically. Larry had opened up to him in a way he’d never been able to open to anyone else, and Jim had been counseling him with the help of Dr. Lansing, a psychologist who works part-time for the school district. Larry seemed to be coming around, struggling to understand his mother and himself—and to some extent succeeding. Then one night, May fifteenth of last year—over fifteen months ago, though it’s hard to believe it’s been that long—Larry Kakonis took a gun from his father’s collection, loaded it, put the barrel in his mouth ... and fired one bullet up into his brain.”

  Holly flinched as if struck. In fact she had been struck, though the blows—two of them—were not physical. She was jolted, first, by the thought of a thirteen-year-old committing suicide when the best of life lay ahead of him. A small problem could seem like a large one at that age, and a genuinely serious problem could seem catastrophic and hopeless. Holly felt a pang of grief for Larry Kakonis, and an undirected anger because the kid had not been given time enough to learn that all horrors can be dealt with and that, on balance, life offered far more joy than despair. But she was equally rattled by the date on which the boy had killed himself: May 15.

  One year later, this past May 15, Jim Ironheart had performed his first miraculous rescue. Sam and Emily Newsome. Atlanta, Georgia. Saved from murder at the hands of a sociopathic holdup man named Norman Rink.

  Holly could sit still no longer. She got up and joined Viola at the edge of the patio. They watched the squirrels.

  “Jim blamed himself,” Viola said.

  “For Larry Kakonis? But he wasn’t responsible.”

  “He blamed himself anyway. That’s how he is. But his reaction seemed excessive, even for Jim. After Larry’s death, he lost interest in teaching. He stopped believing he could make a difference. He’d had so many successes, more than any teacher I’ve ever known, but that one failure was too much for him.”

  Holly remembered the boldness with which Ironheart had scooped Billy Jenkins out of the path of the hurtling pickup truck. That certainly had not been a failure.

  “He just sort of spiraled down into gloom,” Viola said, “couldn’t pull himself out of it.”

  The man Holly had met in Portland had not seemed depressive. Mysterious, yes, and self-co
ntained. But he’d had a good sense of humor, and he’d been quick to smile.

  Viola took a sip of her lemonade. “Funny, it tastes too sour now.” She set the glass down on the concrete near her feet and wiped her damp hand on her slacks. She started to speak again, hesitated, but finally said, “Then ... he got a little strange.”

  “Strange? In what way?”

  “Withdrawn. Quiet. He started taking martial-arts training. Tae Kwon Do. Lots of people are interested in that sort of thing, I guess, but it seemed so out of character for Jim.”

  It didn’t seem out of character for the Jim Ironheart that Holly knew.

  Viola said, “It wasn’t casual with him, either. Every day after school he went for a lesson at a place in Newport Beach. He became obsessive. I worried about him. So in January, when he won the lottery, I was happy. Six million dollars! That’s such a good thing, such big luck, it seemed like it would have to turn his life around, bring him out of his depression.”

  “But it didn’t?”

  “No. He didn’t seem all that surprised or pleased by it. He quit teaching, moved out of his apartment into a house ... and pulled back even further from his friends.” She turned to Holly and smiled. It was the first smile she had managed for a while. “That’s why I was so excited when you told me you were his sister, a sister he doesn’t even know he has. Because maybe you can do for him what winning six million dollars couldn’t do.”

  Guilt over her deception suffused Holly again, bringing a hot blush to her face. She hoped Viola would mistake it for a blush of pleasure or excitement. “It would be wonderful if I could.”

  “You can, I’m sure. He’s alone, or feels that he is. That’s part of his problem. With a sister, he won’t be alone any more. Go see him today, right now.”

  Holly shook her head. “Soon. But not yet. I need to ... build my confidence. You won’t tell him about me, will you?”

  “Of course not, dear. You should have all the fun of telling him, and what a wonderful moment that’ll be.”

  Holly’s smile felt like a pair of rigid plastic lips glued to her face, as false as part of a Halloween costume.

  A few minutes later, at the front door, as Holly was leaving, Viola put a hand on her arm and said, “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. It won’t be easy lifting his spirits, getting him back on track. As long as I’ve known Jim, I’ve felt there’s a sadness deep down in him, like a stain that won’t come out, which isn’t such a surprise, really, when you consider what happened to his parents—his being orphaned when he was only ten, all of that.”

  Holly nodded. “Thanks. You’ve been a real help.”

  Viola impulsively hugged her, planted a kiss on her cheek, and said, “I want to have both you and Jim to dinner as soon as possible. Homemade green-corn tamales, black beans, and jalapeño rice so hot it’ll melt your dental fillings!”

  Holly was simultaneously pleased and dismayed: pleased to have met this woman, who so quickly seemed to be a favorite aunt of long acquaintance; dismayed because she had met her and been accepted by her under false pretenses.

  All the way back to her rental car. Holly fiercely berated herself under her breath. She was at no loss for ugly words and clever damning phrases. Twelve years in newsrooms, in the company of reporters, had acquainted her with enough obscene language to insure her the trophy in a cursing contest with even the most foul-mouthed victim of Tourette’s syndrome.

  The Yellow Pages listed only one Tae Kwon Do school in Newport Beach. It was in a shopping center off Newport Boulevard, between a custom window-covering store and a bakery.

  The place was called Dojo, the Japanese word for a martial-arts practice hall, which was like naming a restaurant “Restaurant” or a dress shop “Dress Shop.” Holly was surprised by the generic name, because Asian businessmen often brought a poetic sensibility to the titling of their enterprises.

  Three people were standing on the sidewalk in front of Dojo’s big window, eating éclairs and awash in the delicious aromas wafting from the adjacent bakery, watching a class of six students go through their routines with a squat but exceptionally limber Korean instructor in black pajamas. When the teacher threw a pupil to the mat inside, the plate-glass window vibrated.

  Entering, Holly passed out of the chocolate-, cinnamon-, sugar-, yeast-scented air into an acidic environment of stale incense laced with a vague perspiration odor. Because of a story she’d written about a Portland teenager who won a medal in a national competition, she knew Tae Kwon Do was an aggressive Korean form of karate, using fierce punches, lightning-quick jabs, chops, blocks, choke-holds, and devastatingly powerful, leaping kicks. The teacher was pulling his blows, but there were still a lot of grunts, wheezes, guttural exclamations, and jarring thuds as students slammed to the mat.

  In the far right corner of the room, a brunette sat on a stool behind a counter, doing paperwork. Every aspect and detail of her dress and grooming were advertisements for her sexuality. Her tight red T-shirt emphasized her ample chest and outlined nipples as large as cherries. With a touseled mane of chestnut hair given luster by artfully applied blond highlights, eyes subtly but exotically shadowed, mouth too lushly painted with deep-coral lipstick, a just-right tan, disablingly long fingernails painted to match the lipstick, and enough silvery costume jewelry to stock a display case, she would have been the perfect advertisement if women had been a product for sale in every local market.

  “Does this thudding and grunting go on all day?” Holly asked.

  “Most of the day, yeah.”

  “Doesn’t it get to you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the brunette said with a lascivious wink, “I know what you mean. They’re like a bunch of bulls ramming at each other. I’m not here an hour every day till I’m so horny I can’t stand it.”

  That was not what Holly had meant. She was suggesting that the noise was headache-inducing, not arousing. But she winked back, girl-to-girl, and said, “The boss in?”

  “Eddie? He’s doing a couple hundred flights of stairs,” the woman said cryptically. “What’d you want?”

  Holly explained that she was a reporter, working on a story that had a connection with Dojo.

  The receptionist, if that’s what she was, brightened at this news instead of glowering, as was often the case. Eddie, she said, was always looking to get publicity for the business. She rose from her stool and stepped to a door behind the counter, revealing that she was wearing high-heeled sandals and tight white shorts that clung to her butt as snugly as a coat of paint.

  Holly was beginning to feel like a boy.

  As the brunette had indicated, Eddie was delighted to hear that Dojo would be mentioned in a newspaper piece, even if tangentially, but he wanted her to interview him while he continued to do stairs. He was not an Asian, which perhaps explained the unimaginative generic name of his business. Tall, blond, shaggy-haired, blue-eyed, he was dressed only in muscles and a pair of black spandex cyclist’s shorts. He was on a StairMaster exercise machine, climbing briskly to nowhere.

  “It’s great,” he said, pumping his exquisitely developed legs. “Six more flights, and I’ll be at the top of the Washington monument.”

  He was breathing hard but not as hard as Holly would have been breathing after running up six flights to her third-floor apartment in Portland.

  She sat in a chair he had indicated, which put the StairMaster directly in front of her, giving her a full side view of him. His sun-bronzed skin glistened with sweat, which also darkened the hair at the nape of his thick neck. The spandex embraced him as intimately as the white shorts had clung to the receptionist. It almost seemed as if he had known Holly was coming and had carefully arranged the StairMaster and her chair to display himself to his best advantage.

  Although she was plunging into deception again, Holly did not feel as bad about lying to Eddie as she had felt when lying to Viola Moreno. For one thing, her cover story this time was somewhat less fanciful: that she was doing a multipart, in-de
pth piece about James Ironheart (the truth), focusing on the effect that winning a lottery had upon his life (a lie), all with his approval (a lie). A veracity percentage as high as thirty-three percent was enough to salve her guilt, which she supposed didn’t say much for the quality of her conscience.

  “Just so you spell Dojo right,” Eddie said. Looking back and down at his right leg, he added happily, “Look at that calf, hard as rock.”

  As if she hadn’t been looking at it all along.

  “The fat layer between my skin and the muscle underneath, it’s hardly there, burned it all away.”

  Another reason she didn’t mind lying to Eddie was because he was a vain, self-involved jerk.

  “Three more flights to the top of the monument,” he said. The rhythm of his speech was tied to the pattern of his breathing, the words rising and falling with each inhalation and exhalation.

  “Just three? Then I’ll wait.”

  “No, no. Ask your questions. I won’t stop at the top. I’m gonna see how much of the Empire State Building I can climb next.”

  “Ironheart was a student of yours.”

  “Yeah. Taught him myself.”

  “He came to you long before he won the lottery.”

  “Yeah. More than a year ago.”

  “May of last year, I think.”

  “Mighta been.”

  “Did he tell you why he wanted to learn Tae Kwon Do?”

  “Nope. But he had a passion.” He almost shouted his next words, as if he’d triumphantly completed a real climb: “Top of the monument!” He increased his pace instead of slacking off.

  “Did you think it was odd?”

  “Why?”

  “Him being a schoolteacher, I mean.”

  “We get schoolteachers. We get all kinds. Everyone wants to kick ass.” He sucked in a very deep breath, blew it out, and said, “In the Empire State now, going up.”

  “Was Ironheart good?”

  “Excellent! Coulda been a competitor.”

  “Could’ve been? You mean he dropped out?”

  Breathing a little harder than before, the words coming in a quicker though similar rhythm, he said: “Hung in there seven or eight months. Every day. He was a real glutton for punishment. Pumping iron and doing aerobics plus martial arts. Ate his way through the pain. Man was getting tough enough to fuck a rock. Sorry. But he was. Then he quit. Two weeks after he won the bucks.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. Wasn’t the money that made him quit.”

  “Then what?”

  “He said I’d given him what he needed, he didn’t want any more.”

  “What he needed?” she asked.

  “Enough Tae Kwon Do for what he wanted to do.”

  “Did he say what he wanted to do?”

  “Nope. Kick someone’s ass, I guess.”

  Eddie was really pushing himself now, ramming his feet down on the StairMaster, pumping and pumping, so much sweat on his body that he appeared to be coated in oil, droplets spraying off his hair when he shook his head, the muscles in his arms and across his broad back bulging almost as fiercely as those in his thighs and calves.

  Sitting in the chair about eight feet from the man, Holly felt as if she were ringside at some sleazy strip club where the gender roles had been reversed. She got up.

  Eddie was staring straight ahead at the wall. His face was creased by lines of strain, but he had a dreamy, faraway look in his eyes. Maybe, instead of the wall, he saw the endless stairwell in the Empire State Building.

  “Anything else he ever told you that seemed ... interesting, unusual?” she asked.

  Eddie didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the climb. The arteries in his neck had swelled and were throbbing as if evenly spaced, small, fat fish were schooling through his bloodstream.

  As Holly reached the door, Eddie said, “Three things.”

  She turned to him again. “Yeah?”

  Without looking at her, his eyes still out of focus, not for an instant slackening his pace, speaking to her from the stairwell of that skyscraper in distant Manhattan, he said, “Ironheart’s the only guy I ever met who can obsess better than I can.”

  Frowning, Holly thought about that. “What else?”

  “The only lessons he missed were two weeks in September. Went up north, Marin County somewhere, to take a course in aggressive driving.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mostly they teach chauffeurs for politicians, diplomats, rich businessmen how to handle a car like James Bond, escape terrorist traps, kidnappers, shit like that.”

  “He talk about why he needed that kind of training?”